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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22925617">The Stars Are Out For Us</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/pseuds/rebelmeg'>rebelmeg</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bucky Barnes &amp; Natasha Romanov Friendship, Bucky Barnes &amp; Steve Rogers Friendship, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Happy Ending, Hydra (Marvel), Kid Bucky Barnes, Red Room (Marvel), Stars, buckynat if you squint</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 06:27:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,295</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22925617</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/pseuds/rebelmeg</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes has always loved the stars.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James "Bucky" Barnes &amp; Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes &amp; Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes &amp; Winifred Barnes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>BBB Special Events</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Stars Are Out For Us</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the BBB Fluffathon, specifically the prompts "outside", "starry night" gif, "admire", and "night".</p>
<p>Don't worry, there is far more fluff than angst.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Bucky Barnes got his love of stars from his mom.</p>
<p>For as long as he could remember, maybe even his very earliest memories, he could recall looking at his mother in anticipation, watching her face eagerly, waiting as the sky got dark outside.  Sometimes she was as excited as he was, other times she made him wait and pretended not to see him fidgeting over it.  But every night she would finally look at him, smile a secret smile, and ask, “What do you think, baby?  Are the stars out for us tonight?”</p>
<p>And he would go running to the window, shoving aside the curtain and craning his face to see the sky around the edge of the roof, searching for a little speck of light in the dark.</p>
<p>“Ma, the stars are out!”</p>
<p>Those were the best nights.  Even as an adult, Bucky would feel somewhat glum when he saw clouds in the sky during the night.  But on clear nights, he and his mother would go out onto the little narrow balcony outside their apartment, lie down next to each other, and look up at the stars.</p>
<p>Winifred Barnes told her little boy all about them, all the stories and myths, how to find and shape the constellations, telling him the names of the brightest stars they could see.  And every night, before going to bed, they both picked out a star, closed their eyes, and whispered the rhyme together:</p>
<p>
  <i>Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,<br/>I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.</i>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>Bucky became intimately familiar with all the stars he could see by the time he was twelve.  </p>
<p>They had moved into another apartment, this one on the ground floor of a building, and they had a tiny patio out back where he would lie on his back and stare up at his own slice of the sky visible between the apartment buildings rising around him.  There were only ever forty-six of them visible, at most, depending on the time of year.  He had counted them many times, in many seasons, and he loved each and every one of them.</p>
<p>He knew his ma’s stories by heart, could pick out the constellations she had taught him, and they had spent long hours together poring over a big star map that they had found in a secondhand store.  Bucky swore someday that he was going to go to Australia or Antarctica, so he could get to know all the stars on that side of the world.</p>
<p>By the time he was a teenager, and big enough to climb up on the roof of the apartment building they lived in, he would go up there as often as he could.  He’d stare at his stars, whisper their names, trace the lines of their constellations with his finger, and think to himself as he stared up at the twinkling pinpricks of light.  He was always amazed at how many he could see from up on the roof, and marveled at how they all felt like friends.</p>
<p>When he met Steve, rescuing the little scruffy, furious punk from a fist fight he was losing hard, they were friends for life even before they stepped out of the alley, Bucky’s handkerchief pressed to Steve’s split lip, and bruises on Bucky’s knuckles from punching the lights out of the two bullies that Steve had been fighting.  It didn’t take long for Bucky’s love of the stars to become obvious to Steve, and after a little while, Steve didn’t even have to ask anymore where Bucky was when he visited after dark.</p>
<hr/>
<p>“You know where he is,” Winifred Barnes smiled at Steve when she answered the door, nodding upwards.</p>
<p>Bucky, flat on his back on the roof, heard the rattle of the fire escape, and turned his head just as Steve’s blond head appeared over the edge of the roof.</p>
<p>“Heya, Stevie.”</p>
<p>“Heya, Buck.  You know your ma knows you’re up here, right?”</p>
<p>“Course she does.  She comes up with me sometimes.”</p>
<p>Steve laid down too, staring up at the stars that he thought were pretty, but didn’t hold quite the same fascination for him that they did for Bucky.</p>
<p>“Lookit that one, Steve.” He said, pointing up and to the left.  “That yellow-lookin’ one.”</p>
<p>“’S pretty neat.”	</p>
<p>“That’s a <i>planet</i>, Stevie.  Mars, if I’m right.  A whole planet, we’re lookin’ at a whole planet out there.” Bucky’s voice was full of incredible awe and wonder.</p>
<p>It made Steve smile.</p>
<hr/>
<p>There were… flaws.  A few of them.  In the conditioning that had been employed to create Hydra’s Asset.  It was less effective the longer the operative was in use, so putting him back in cryostasis and resetting him every time became a necessity.  But it had been a rude shock to everyone the first time it happened, the first time the Asset broke his conditioning.</p>
<p>It had been his third assignment, an assassination that, up until that point, he had carried out perfectly.</p>
<p>And then suddenly, for no reason… the Asset had stopped and looked up at the stars.</p>
<p>Somewhere in the mess of static in his brain that rested under the control words and his orders… he could hear a voice.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Star light, star bright,”</i>
</p>
<p>What… who was that?  He shook his head, confused.</p>
<p>
  <i>“First star I see tonight.”</i>
</p>
<p>His eyes were drawn inexorably to the stars above his head, hundreds of them twinkling in the dark, tantalizing him with fragments of memory that he didn’t understand and couldn’t quite touch.</p>
<p>He was tranquilized a moment later, crumpling to the ground, though his eyes were on the stars until they closed.</p>
<hr/>
<p>The dark figure standing alone against the huge windows made Natalia pause as she passed the large training room, and she pressed herself against the wall to peer around the edge of the door.</p>
<p>It was the Asset standing there, his face tilted up as he looked at the sky through the glass.</p>
<p>Natalia was confused.  There was… something on his face, something that made her think of the way she felt when she watched the older girls graduate from the Black Widow training program, leaving the Red Room on their first assignments.</p>
<p>Something like yearning.</p>
<p>He moved quicker than Natalia could hide, and a flash of fear went through her as he looked her way.  She ran then, on silent feet, back to her dorm room where the other girls in her age group were sleeping.</p>
<p>It would be best to forget what she’d seen.  It was no business of hers if the Asset spent his nights staring out the window at stars.</p>
<hr/>
<p>“I’ve never seen so many before.  Ever, not even before the war.”</p>
<p>Natasha smiled but didn’t say anything as she laid side by side with Bucky in the grass near his hut.  The heat of the Wakandan day had cooled just enough that a breeze whispering past almost made her shiver.</p>
<p>“You can even see the Milky Way.” Bucky murmured again, trailing the path of stars with his hand where they stretched across the sky.</p>
<p>“Shuri said she finds you out here all the time when she comes down in the mornings.  You just fall asleep out here looking at the stars?”</p>
<p>She felt Bucky’s shrug against her shoulder. “The bugs and goats and kids get into my hut anyway.  At least this way I have a hell of a view.”</p>
<p>Lacing her fingers through his, Natasha gave his hand a gentle squeeze.  “That you do.  Which one is your favorite?”</p>
<p>Well over an hour later, when Bucky was still telling her stories, tracing constellations, naming stars, and exclaiming over all the new stars he had yet to learn… Natasha just smiled.</p>
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